Greetings and welcome to the “Rules of the Road”. The following will serve as the guidelines for our community. The rules are (roughly speaking) modifications of the original Oppositelock rules from the old days when we Oppositelock was attached to Jalopnik.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Now, is this realistic? We certainly hope so, as many of you already live this ethos. But this is, technically, a moderated space, however the overwhelmingly vast majority of this community is already self moderating. What should this mean for you? It should mean that moving forward we want Oppositelock to continue to be the awesome community that it is, and we want to strive to be the potential that we have always had. It also kind of sort of means that there is a teeny tiny shift, as we are asking you to approach confrontation from the perspective of still maintaining relationships and community. Not burning bridges, not being dicks to one another, but consciously seeking to resolve, rather than escalate issues.
Some basic history. Oppo is a community which originated from the need for an offtopic area from Jalopnik. It has grown into its own over the years and into the largest, most populated, quickest moving community on Kinja. Oppo is made up of over 3000 authors from a wide range of backgrounds. It is this diversity which makes us special.
With the growth of Oppo to its current state, many things have changed. But much more has not. Kinja brought about the ability to moderate content and this suddenly meant that the previously self enforcing rules, that occasionally required either Jalopnik editors or Kinja Help’s intervention, could now be handled directly by the volunteer moderation team which runs the blog. The following rules are provided in addition to the Kinja content guidelines.
The Rules
The Rules of Oppositelock basically can be summed up thusly:
- Don’t be a dick. Be excellent to each other.
- Seriously, don’t be a dick be excellent to each other.
- And take ownership of the community, be stewards and ambassadors for what this community means. Don’t take fights elsewhere or bring them back here from outside. (Specifically this entails no trolling, and no troll parties).
- NSFW posts containing nudity or implied nudity are not permitted within Oppo. They previously had been allowed / tolerated. However, they are not anymore because they were causing many issues, lead to the site being blocked for some people, and also because there is no way for us to guarantee those posts were being seen only by those of legal age.
- Thus, NSFW posts in violation of the above will definitely be deleted, and may lead to additional moderator action, depending on commenter intent.
- Any type of NSFW material must be announced in the title of your post and be hidden behind a safe lead image. Additionally, we expect NSFW material to still follow all rules outlined here. (If you have doubts whether it’s NSFW, it is.) This includes gore, graphic accident footage or anything else that might get someone in trouble if their boss caught them reading it at work, assuming that you are allowed to browse the internet at work.
- In the very rare situation where nudity is unavoidable, but the topic is highly relevant (for example, let’s say that there was a post which went into the history of nose art of the B-24 Liberator and focused on all of the surviving nose art, not just those that appeared to be pin up based artwork), and nudity is NOT the primary subject, but rather an unavoidable secondary or tertiary component of the nature of your post, please use your discretion and be very aware of the rules above. Any posts which appear to to be using this exception solely as an end around of this rule will be dealt with as outlined above.
- Political / Sensitive topics are welcome, even encouraged, however it is recommended that you announce such content in the title and that all sensitive material is posted “after the jump.”
- Respect your fellow commenters. Do not “doxx” anyone without their explicit permission (do not reveal personal details about a person which could be used to identify them).
The Details
OppositeLock is an off topic forum for everyone that happens to have a very obvious and intentional leaning toward subjects focused mainly on all things automotive, mechanical and generally of interest to folks who love all manner of contraptions that move. However, that doesn’t limit us to only those topics. We’re all humans here. We have lives, we will probably talk about them in detail. But this community is for everyone. If there are commenters from Groupthink/Jezebel/Gizmodo/Reddit/Mars who want to talk cars or pick our collective minds on the best planes from World War II? Awesome. The same goes for everybody else from anywhere else. We have, and will continue to welcome anyone who shows interest in joining and contributing / building our community and adhering to the community guidelines.
However, That is not to say that everyone will initially get author access or that everyone will be approved. In practice, unless we know you to be a troll by name, and you have not expressed a desire to join our community and understand that your prior behavior will probably, at least initially, color the reactions to you (we can, and do forgive, we rarely forget), in general we’ll probably add anyone who asks to join, but if you have no commenting history, we may ask you to wait a bit and comment here for a while before we add you. We want to make clear that while this isn’t Jalopnik, we do still mainly talk about cars and car related subjects, that this is an off topic forum that is a general purpose space and, accordingly, our aim is to make this a welcoming place that people feel comfortable interacting with each other in.
In order to accomplish this, we strongly discourage people from making posts attacking other commenters or communities, starting inter-forum pissing contests, and purposefully picking fights with people you don’t get along with.
We are not asking that everyone get along. We are not banning cathartic ranting. But we are asking that authors on this forum maybe think twice before posting about how much they hate Commenter X, especially when they know Commenter X will see the post, and everyone will start bitching about everyone else. No one enjoys seeing that go down. It’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, and most importantly, it damages the community. This would, in 99.99% of occasions, be considered a major violation of rules #1-3. What is that 0.01% of exception? Publicly being called out for behavior which violates the spirit and/or rules of the community which also will enrich the community by raising the levels of awareness.
The expectation is to treat others the way you would actually want people to treat you in a public space where consequences exist. Though this should go without saying, explicit or heavily implied sexism and racism will not be tolerated, period. This has little to do with “being PC” but is based on the expectation of being an open and respectful space. Personal attacks, call to arm posts, asking who the most reviled commenter or community here is, essentially any commenting behavior which specifically negatively attacks another commenter, area or member of staff with the intent to cause disruption or general harm to a specific commenter or to the community at large is verboten. You will be warned, suspended or banned depending on the severity of the issue and other criteria.
A major point of clarification. The moderators are not here to censor unpopular opinions. We are not asking you to post only along certain political views. We are not asking you to refrain from discussing touchy subjects. The moderators are not here to police your views. For the most part (see above) talk about anything you want – make your points respectfully and clearly, accept that not everyone will agree with what you have to say, and understand that this is an open forum where a lot of different people will read your post, and where anyone can reply to you. Above all, be excellent to each other.
The Moderators
I am one of the moderators. I am not the owner of the forum, that particular role belongs to Porsche9146. In the spirit of openness, here is a complete list of all volunteer moderators:
Porsche9146
Gamecat235
Nobody
Brian1321
Pauljones
Demon-Xanth
Snapundersteer Italianspiderman
For Sweden
Dusty Ventures
Party-VI
Brian, the life of
Crown Victor Victoria
More Power!! And also some brakes
Axel-Ripper
Delta Five Nine
$kaycog
Jagvar
Hammerhead Fistpunch
Arch Duke Maxyenko
Yamahog
As moderators, our goal is to essentially be invisible when we are in that role, occasionally reminding people of the rules, and our expected primary public function is welcoming newcomers and adding users to the community. I would like to add to this that all of the moderators are unpaid volunteers in this capacity. We do this in our free time, out of dedication to, and appreciation for, this community.
The launch of Kinja has given you, the commenters, access to a number of tools that used to be admin-only. This means less work for us, but it also means that you, the commenters, need to be more responsible for your conversations on this board. If someone is harassing you in response to something you wrote? Dismiss them. If the conversation is unproductive, walk away. If someone is chiding you for cursing too much, dismiss them and walk away. Basically, we expect you all to act like adults and therefore to handle conflict like adults (this applies even if you are not technically an adult).
If you run into a situation that you are unsure of how to handle, or if you find a troll or have a persistent issue with another commenter, feel free to contact any of the mods for assistance. You can find us on-site or email us at oppomoderator@gmail.com or contact us on Twitter.
Want to know what powers a moderator actually has? Check out this helpful post on Hackerspace.
Posting Access
There are two main levels of posting access to Oppo. One is the basic commenter and the other is authorship privileges.
Like on the main page, anyone is free to comment on any thread on Oppo. If you are not ‘followed’ by Oppo, your comment will show up as ‘grey’. This is not a judgment on your worth as a person or a commenter; it is simply how Kinja works.
Authorship privileges are granted by the mods. If you wish to post to Oppositelock, respond to one of our semi-regular request threads. These posts will always be under the tag “Club Openings” so that these posts can be easily found. You may not get authorship the first time you ask, but you are welcome to request again at any point. (See any request post for expanded details on this process.)
Authors are able to follow/unfollow commenters on behalf of ‘Oppositelock’. ‘Following’ moves a commenter from a ‘grey’ to a ‘black’. We trust authors enough to not need our permission to ‘follow’ a commenter – we wouldn’t have made you authors if we didn’t trust you in the first place. However, any author found to be abusing their posting access to mess with other commenter’s status on Oppo will have their authorship revoked, and possibly be banned from the forum.
Anything else I/we can clarify? Let me know and I, or one of the other mods will respond to you.